Employers or companies often provide incentive programs to encourage employees or vendors to increase their effort to sell certain products or services. Incentive programs operate under several principles. One of the principles behind incentive programs is that by allowing other employees at the same level to see how fellow employees and/or competitors are doing, the employee is encouraged to match or beat the achievements of his or her fellow employees or competitors. Another principle behind incentive programs is that by rewarding a positive act, there is a likelihood that the act would be repeated to the benefit of both the employer and the employee.
Traditional incentive often involved manually inputting information related to the incentive program and then retaining hard copies of the compiled information. While such programs may work, several problems have arisen during their operation. Notably, such programs often involved a significant lag time between the action taken and the incentive reward associated with the action. In other words, in traditional incentive programs, after selling a product that qualifies under the incentive program, the employee would often have to submit a claim that would be manually inputted. Such a process could take several months, thereby diminishing the positive causal relationship between the act of selling the product and the associated reward. Delays in updating reports also inhibit the ability of employees to compare their achievement or progress with other employees, peers or competitors. Additionally, manual inputting information and calculating rewards increased the risk of incorrect input or calculations. Likewise, if such systems were computer-based, they were traditionally kept on the computer systems of the employer or the system of the company administering the incentive program. Accordingly updates and/or modifications typically had to be performed by the company administering the program. As a result, access to such information by the participants was often somewhat restricted or the posting of updated information was often delayed.
Because of the above problems, among others, participants in the traditional incentive programs were unable to readily compare how they were doing relative to other participants at their hierarchical level. Additionally, participants were unable to view the compilation of incentive reward information for the employees or participants under their realm of responsibility or command to allow participants to monitor their progress and provide the necessary follow-up to those participants who are not meeting expectations.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that allows different levels of management to immediately access information concerning the incentive program with respect to their entire realm of responsibility, while being economical and easy to manufacture and install. There is likewise a need to provide an online system that can be accessed and/or maintained by authorized personnel remotely so as to provide easy access to such up-to-date information and/or provide at least some degree of self-administration.